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I'll pound you to a "Pulp" if you don't show off yours!
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Started by mr.schomburg,

9,154 posts in this topic

Pat Calhoun

Pat Calhoun

Posted
Posted

Was only 3 days ago when BB posted some A Merritt Fantasy covers, and I vowed to reread Abe’s ‘Three Lines of Old French’. Did so tonight, an old-fashioned 1919 classic where a young man on a WWI battlefield is transported to an idyllic France of 200 years ago. What’s funny is that last night I bought this Feb 1953 Space Stories (not this copy) for my Brackett fetish, and it contains a story by Henry Hasse: ‘Three Lines of Old Martian’…

spacestories3.jpg

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Theagenes

Theagenes

Posted
Posted

David M. Earle, founder of The Pulp Magazines Project at Pulpmags.com, professor of literature at the University of West Florida, and a colleague of mine at PCA/ACA has put together an amazing exhibit of pulps and pulp art at the UWF Art Gallery in Pensacola. Here are some images of the exhibit which will be running until Feb 22.

 

Modern Pulp

 

 

qJt9Q2B.jpg

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Theagenes

Theagenes

Posted
Posted
fun show and congrats on the anthology

 

Thanks, Pat!

This is what he's referring to. I have a new anthology of zombie stories from the pulps out now. And it was made possible with considerable help from Bang Zoom and Red Fury, who provided scnas and images. Thanks guys!

 

http://www.skelospress.com/p/catalog.html

 

 

l4RRYyu.jpg

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Monkeyman

Monkeyman

Posted
Posted

Here is the description of the lot from Heritage:

 

"Weird Tales Group (Popular Fiction, 1933) Condition: Average FN-. Includes the February, April, May, August, and November 1933 issues. Includes "Shambleau" by C. L. Moore, "Revelations in Black" by Carl Jacobi, and "Golden Blood" by Jack Williamson. Covers by J. Allen St. John and Margaret Brundage. Complete covers and spines, supple cream to off-white pages. Spines faded to orange. Approximate Bookery's Guide to Pulps value for group = $875. From the Frank Collection."

 

As an unsophisticated pulp collector, I have a couple of questions about these books which I hope the boards can answer for me.

 

- The front and back covers of these pulps don't have any overhangs so I'm assuming they are trimmed and, more specifically, you can see the particularly poor job of trimming at the bottom of a few of them. Is this something Heritage should have noted or is showing big scans enough?

 

- The Table of Contents of each pulp is annotated as in the scan below. Should this have been mentioned in Heritage's description? Is this something specific to the Frank Collection?

 

WeirdTalesNov33ToC_zps4bc34731.jpg

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

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Xaltotun

Xaltotun

Posted
Posted (edited)

Ah! I think there's a story here, and I believe I can tell that story...

I will have things to say about one very (in)famous collector...

Give me a few minutes.

 

Ah one question: did they mention a provenance for those pulps?

Edited by Xaltotun
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Xaltotun

Xaltotun

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Posted

So, first things first, yes, trimming should have been noted. Many pulp collectors, myself included, don't like trimming, and I prefer slits and overhang to trimming; some don't care, but in all cases this should have been mentioned.

 

The vast majority of the pulps from this collection were bought by none other than the famous Dentist. I know, because he sold tons of them on Ebay in the past few weeks. His ebay handle is Thebigloo. He still has some high grade pulps for sale as I write this. From what I can judge, in retrospect, the immense majority were trimmed, some very obviously.

 

Anyway, I ended up bidding and winning one of those ultra high grade Weird Tales (full red spine, no defect, wonderful eye appeal)... except that it had very obviously been trimmed on two sides (which was impossible to detect from the ebay scans). So I sent it back and was refunded promptly. No problem here.

 

My problem comes from all the work I did before winning that auction. I started tracking most of them, seeing how much they sold for, etc. and discovered something real fishy. Here's the listing I prepared at the time, all based on the bidding habits of bidder m***l (56).

 

Of the 18 Weird Tales I worked on, (I may have overlooked one or two), you can see he didn't bid on the last four (ie the first four, chronologically speaking). He bid on 11 of the 12 others, winning 5. The stars at the end mean feedback received by thebigloo. l***l (56) hasn't left any feedback yet, though his earliest purchase was Jan 06...

 

So you have item #, m***l rank (ie won, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) WT Ish, if feedback was received or not. note that data is a month old and hasn't been updated since.

 

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201015709280 [2nd, Dec 30] ****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201015708302 [won, 12 Jan, Jan 31]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201015705384 [won, 12 Jan, Jul 31]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201015703486 [won, 12 Jan, Jan 32]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201015701769 [won, 12 Jan, Feb 32]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201015707050 [didn't bid] ****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201011698423 [4th, Dec 27] ****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201011697035 [3rd]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201011694697 [won, 05 Jan, Feb 30]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201011693530 [3rd, 06 Jan, Oct 31]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201008342205 [11th, Jul 27] *****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201008339552 [7th, Aug 27] ****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201008338418 [2nd, Sep 27] ******

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201008336545 [6th, Nov 27] *****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201005059168 [didn't bid, Apr 27] ****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201005055086 [didn't bid]

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201005056403 [didnt bid, Jun 27] ****

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&_trksid=p2047675.l2565&rt=nc&item=201005053663 [didn't bid]

 

In other words, m****l (56) bid dozens and dozens of tiimes on items sold by the Dentist. Go check the bidding history while you still can. When thebigloo had almost only Weird Tales up for auction, m****l (56)'s bidding ratio was something like 95% on thebigloo items. Poor Mr. m****l (56) left hundreds of bids, and he almost always lost! Of course, all those Weird Tales were sold for seriously inflated prices to other bidders who outbid m****l all the time!.Poor m****l (56)...

The good news is that mr m***l won 5 of those Weird Tales! Or maybe he didn't, because if you check the feedback of thebigloo / The Dentist, you will see that feedback was never left for/by m***l (56)... As if there never was any real transaction. Could there be a transaction if they are one and the same? At any rate, I wonder where these WT will show up next? Sold at a convention? Someplace other than Ebay?

 

m***l (56) is either the Dentist himself or one of his cronies shill-bidding for him.

That Dentist guy is a credit to the hobby, really. Fortunately he doesn't have any valuable items in his collection, right? :mad:

 

 

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Matthew42383

Matthew42383

Posted
Posted

I bought a few of the wt's when he first started listing them. late 20's. since then ive bought most of the stuff that's ended in the last few weeks that is nonwt, non dime. the wt's I bought had the writing but it was viewable in the pics. he also mentioned they were trimmed in the auction. the other books I bought came exactly as described too. Don't know anything about heritage wts though.

 

I'm 99.9% sure he does NOT have anyone shill bidding for him. Frankly the guys a millionaire many times over, and a serious collector, to be bidding up a couple auctions is silly for an extra couple thousand and possibly a black mark on his name in pulp collecting.

 

As far as leaving feedback goes, as someone who's off and on there selling semiregularly, I can tell you that while in the early 2000's 90% of buyers left feedback, nowadays, it's closer to 40%, at least for those who sell old books.

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Matthew42383

Matthew42383

Posted
Posted

lastly, I looked at mls bids. its not reminiscent of a shill bidder at all. Frankly, the ml's bids are too cheap. If he was trying to bid up the items, he would have showed up as 2nd on most of them and 1st on a few by accident. That didn't happen.

 

Oh, and the bidder in there with 22500 feedback, that was me. And yes, I was bidding them up too. But to be fair I was trying to win until I found something I liked more. :-p

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